


Good Men, Going to

by Zetared



Category: Doctor Who, MASH (TV)
Genre: Drunkenness, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 21:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18270020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zetared/pseuds/Zetared
Summary: Just an excuse to throw MASH and Doctor Who together. Can be read as taking place in the universe of Prodigal, but it's not necessary to know the series to appreciate this little Thought, I think.





	Good Men, Going to

Hawkeye, sweating off still fumes and stumbling his way from the latrine back to the arguable warmth of his bed (and, in hindsight, he’ll thank his lucky stars that he was headed _back from_ and not headed _to_ said latrine at the time) pauses mid-stride when he sees the box.

The Army likes boxes, so he doesn’t think a lot of it, at first. Big boxes, little boxes. Boxes that hold one-thousand mismarked bottles of placebo pills. Boxes that hold cans of muddy peas, busted up in transit and spilling out moldy vegetation that looks, smells, and probably tastes no different than its unspoiled betters. Boxes that hold men--boys, really--with pristine, crisp flags folded lightly on top like icing smeared on a cake.

Hawkeye is still drunk. Drunk and maudlin. One of those baby-faced soldiers died on him, tonight. It happens, even with a camp-wide success rating of 98%, and losing a patient never gets easier. He’d been half an hour into another round of meatball surgery--just enough stitching being done to hold the soldier's body together--everything progressing right as rain. Then, unexpected but somehow also always expected, complications arose. The kid is nameless, as far as Hawkeye is concerned. Faceless, even, thanks to the well-placed white sheets (Hawkeye tries not to think of them as preliminary shrouds, he really does). The kid is just one dead man out of dozens, by now, to die under Hawkeye’s hands.

And, yet. And. Yet. 

Hawkeye is still drunk, and he’s not even half drunk _enough_.

“Being ‘drunk enough’ would require a swimming pool of hooch,” Hawkeye mutters to himself as he blearily approaches The Box. “And no lifeguards.”

Maudlin. He wishes BJ had managed to stay conscious for just a few hours longer. Or, at the very least, that Hawkeye himself had enough selfishness in him to rudely wake the other surgeon up and bully him into escorting Hawkeye to and from the john. BJ has a knack for helping Hawkeye keep the creeping shadows at the corners of his vision in the corners. That’s the best thing about a good comedy partner; BJ provides harmony for all the whistling Hawkeye likes to do in the dark.

“I think you’re heading in the wrong direction,” a voice says, mildly, and Hawkeye startles back so hard he nearly ends up on his ass. He throws himself violently forward, instead, to compensate, and ends up clinging with one hand to the edge of The Box and digging the fingers of his other hand into the dark-colored velvet coat of the man who has, to Hawkeye’s reckoning, appeared from nowhere. They’re of a height, he and the stranger. Hawkeye finds himself blinking into blue eyes and then focusing instead on the fierce gray brows above them. 

_General_ , his brain supplies, hazily, and he neglects to salute accordingly. He does, however, let go of the man’s arm and stands more-or-less upright on his own power once more. Hawkeye doesn’t like to lie on top of officers. At least, not without their consent.

“‘Wrong direction?’ That depends entirely on where you think I’m going,” Hawkeye says back, nonsensically. It’s not even a joke. He’s just confused, off balanced. Half asleep. _Drunk_.

The man ignores him and turns around a bit in place, looking this way and that way in the dim glow of the overhead spotlight. Not too far from here, probably, Klinger and some lackey are patrolling. Hawkeye could shout for help, if he wanted.

 _Shout?_ Hawkeye’s brain questions, about six steps behind at the moment, _Why are we shouting? He’s not even armed_.

The man tilts his head up and lifts his nose like he’s smelling something of significance on the wind. He mutters “Korean War,” to himself in a low, Scottish brogue. He does not sound happy. Hawkeye sympathizes completely.

When the man turns his full gaze back on Hawkeye, eyes going from his head to his toes and back again, Hawkeye tenses. Predator-prey reaction, instinctive as it is bizarre. _Not armed, huh?_ Some lingeringly rational part of his brain snorts. _Sure._

But then something about the stranger’s bearing--his posture, his expression? Both?--shifts and the feeling of primal danger disappears as if it had never been. He still looks severe--can’t help it, with those eyebrows; Hawkeye’s dad has eyebrows like that, and he’s always fighting against their dour affect with his soft gestures and bad jokes. Despite the brows, the man appears... well…’kind’ is the only word that Hawkeye can scramble up. 

“That’s a nice box you have there,” Hawkeye says, his own gaze drifting away from the stranger to the outlier that had originally caught his attention. It’s about the size of one of their shower stalls. Blue. Glowing, at the top, brighter than the overhead lights above them by far. The sign over the door says something about police, but Hawkeye doesn’t think it refers to the MPs. 

“You’re dreaming,” the stranger says, which makes Hawkeye blink and stare at him, incredulous.

The man shrugs slightly. “Worth a try.”

Hawkeye steps forward and circles the box. It’s small and his legs are long, so it doesn’t take but a moment to work his way from front to back and around again. He can swear there’s a sound coming from it. Soft and lulling, the repetitive grinding of machinery in action, like the low purr of any vehicle that _isn’t_ an Army Jeep. It reminds him, viscerally, of the steady thrum of the ventilators in the OR. It’s the sound of living, to Hawkeye’s ears. The vibrant blue color of the box appeals to him, too, the same way any color that isn’t dirt brown, blood red, or olive green appeals to him. He touches the wooden paneling on the side, entranced. It’s warm against his palm, especially compared to the chill of the night.

“This isn’t the most surreal dream I’ve ever had while marinating in a drunken stupor,” he tells the man, conversationally, “but it’s close.”

The man seems heartened by Hawkeye’s concession to his outrageous lie. “Yes, well. Hope you enjoyed it. Back to bed, then? Marvelous. Sleep well. ‘Bye.”

Hawkeye yawns at the mere suggestion of bed and sleep, but he’s not to be deterred. This is the most interesting thing to pop up unannounced in the camp since that one time with the yak. He pushes his cold fingers into the pockets of his robe and gives the man the same full appraisal he himself had been on the receiving end of just moments before. The man bears it with an air of long-suffering and resignation. They both know that Hawkeye isn’t going back to bed until he gets this mystery sorted out. 

“The nightwatch is going to come back around here any second, you know,” Hawkeye threatens, just in case.

“Yes, I saw them before. A man in a very lovely mink coat and a nervous-looking child holding a weapon bigger than he is. I’m not overly concerned.”

Yeah, Hawkeye doesn’t blame him.

“Should _I_ be concerned?” he asks, taking a different track. There’s no reason to be aggressive with the stranger if the stranger’s intentions are benign. And, honestly, what else can they be? He’s a Scottish man in a magician costume. With a box.

The man’s eyes drift around the camp again, looking pained. “I should think so, yes. Every minute of every hour you spend here and then even a few hours more afterward, you should be concerned.”

Hawkeye hums thoughtfully. He throws his thumb back toward the Swamp. “Do you want a drink? I say ‘drink.’ It’s more like ‘do you want some engine fuel in a martini glass,’ but the end result is more or less the same.”

“Oh?” the Doctor deadpans, the perfect straight man.

“Alcohol or engines. Either way, you end up somewhere different than when you started.”

“‘Different,’” the Doctor notes. “Not better.”

Hawkeye shrugs, the movement especially pronounced in his sloping, aching shoulders. The world has been awfully heavy on them, as of late, and it shows.

“Aren’t your comrades asleep in that tent?”

“What, can’t you swallow quietly?”

The man’s face does something complicated in response to Hawkeye’s accidental-but-not-really-accidental innuendo. It’s like he wants to laugh and cringe in horror at the same time. Hawkeye often has that effect on new people, so he’s not offended. 

“Oh, I’m quite adept at doing most things quietly,” the stranger says, breezily. “But _talking_ is not always one of them. It’s the accent, this time around. You just cannot whisper, with a voice like this.”

Hawkeye doesn’t especially want to talk. That’s why he wants to drink, instead. Ideally, what he’d like to do is sleep, but there’s not a chance in hell he’s going to pick nightmares and drooling into his pillow over the experience of...whatever is happening to him right now.

“There’s brandy, apparently, in this box,” the stranger breaks in, throwing his own thumb back just as Hawkeye had done before. There’s something...suggestive, in what the man says. Not suggestive in the way that Hawkeye is usually suggestive; it’s not a proposition. It’s not a joke. It’s...something odd, something that sparks another instrictive, primal shudder through Hawkeye’s spine. This time, it’s one of anticipation. Pleasurable, not terrifying. 

“Lead on, McDuff.”

The stranger’s face does something complicated again. “This isn’t banter, is it?” he questions, more suspicious than Hawkeye thinks is required--like he’s asking if there’s poison in his metaphorical teacup, instead. 

“With me, everything is banter,” Hawkeye admits.

The stranger heaves a long-suffering sigh. “Just my luck.” He then turns, leans past Hawkeye, and fits a small key into a lock that Hawkeye had frankly not noticed, before. The doors open with a creak that strikes Hawkeye as very on-the-nose, like the simulated sound effect of what some movie technician thinks a door should sound like when it moves.

“Please, after you.”

Hawkeye shoots the man another incredulous look. “You know, my mother always told me not to walk into strange boxes,” he quips. 

“How interesting,” the man replies, deadpan again. “My mother often told me the same. I didn’t listen. Now look where I am.”

“In the middle of a warzone…?” Hawkeye retorts, dryly. 

The man sighs. “Banter.”

Hawkeye grins, unrepententing and, hedging his bets, he steps past the man’s arm and into the box.

\--

“Most people are more impressed.”

“If you think ‘bigger on the inside’ is going to impress me, you should try living for a few years in an Army tent. The Swamp is just ‘smaller on the outside,’ but I figure it equals out to pretty much the same thing.” Hawkeye pauses. His wide, wide eyes and hunched, nervous posture belie the bravado of his words. “Also, I’m soused to the gills. I’ll believe anything, right now.”

“Maybe brandy isn’t what you need.”

Hawkeye considers the promise of real, actual brandy compared to the acidic burn of the Swamp’s still swill and the cheap, watered-down tawng of Rosie’s overpriced beers. “I know we just met, so I’ll forgive you for the sheer and utter sacrilege that just passed your lips. Barman, pour me a double.”

The man sighs but does as asked. He pulls the decanter of alcohol from a literal hole in the wall. Hawkeye tries not to think about it--any of it--too much. “You know, men who drink together typically introduce themselves, first.”

The stranger pours himself a few fingers of the alcohol and, obligingly--if perhaps inadvisably--pours Hawkeye his requested double. If Hawkeye’s hands shake a tiny bit as he takes the glass, neither men makes comment.

“I’m called the Doctor.”

Hawkeye, already nose-deep into the glass and sniffing with all the fervor of a bloodhound, chokes and balks, rearing back. “Strong,” he comments, voice creaky. 

The Doctor may smile. Hawkeye’s eyes are tearing up, so it’s hard to tell. 

“I’m a doctor, too,” he says, after swallowing thickly a few times. He hasn’t even taken a sip, yet. “Dr. Benjamin Pierce. But everyone calls me Hawkeye.”

“ _Last of the Mohicans_ ,” the Doctor notes, thoughtfully, eyes curious.

“Dad’s favorite book. The only non-medical book he’s ever read, to hear him tell it. It’s a lie, though, if you count all the bedtime stories he read after mom--. And I do. Count them, I mean. God, what _is_ this stuff? I can’t tell if it’s a step above or six steps _below_ the moonshine hooch Beej and I make in the Swamp.”

“Give it a chance,” the Doctor advises, sipping his own glass with utter ease. “It tastes better than it smells. To be fair to the maker, it’s not exactly intended for humanity’s limited palette. You’d need another tongue, I think, to appreciate the flavor in full.”

Hawkeye stares at him. He sips the drink. “A dream, you said?” he jokes, hopefully.

“It could be easier for you, that way,” the Doctor agrees. He’s definitely smiling, now. It’s more in his eyes than his mouth, but Hawkeye can see it. He knows how to recognize humor in just about anybody.

“I’ve never gone in for ‘easier,’” Hawkeye sighs, looking around the immense, sleek interior of the shabby, tiny wooden box. “My motto is ‘why put off ‘til tomorrow what can drive you to insanity today?’”

“She’s my TARDIS,” the Doctor offers, as if knowing _more words_ will in anyway help dispel the rising sense of nauseating culture shock rolling around in Hawkeye’s guts. “My spaceship. And my time machine.”

Hawkeye breathes in slowly through his nose and takes another, longer sip of the so-called brandy. It lights his entire body on fire for a few seconds before curling around the knot in his stomach, picking the threads of it apart with burning knives. Effective, if uncomfortable. He breathes out his mouth, and a world of tension goes with it. “Still not the flashiest vehicle a man has ever tried to pick me up in,” Hawkeye says, with just the right twist of humor to pass it off as an especially scandalous joke.

The Doctor just looks at him for a moment. “I had a lemon yellow speedster, once, a long time ago, if that’s more your style.” His face makes that same complicated expression, like a man who used to play the game with the best of them but whose skills at flirtation have gone to rust with age. Trying to engage and meet Hawkeye’s charm step for step, but too self-conscious and maybe even a bit too unnerved to manage it. 

Hawkeye’s met a lot of older soldiers who make that face in “This Man’s Army.” They usually warm up to him, eventually. Typically over drinks, in fact, though rarely in quarters as spacious and well-lit as these. 

Maudlin. Hawkeye frowns into his drink and avoids the Doctor’s eyes.

The Doctor fidgets and offers, with a much lighter tone, “Her name was Bessie.”

“The car’s?” Hawkeye asks, his amusement stronger than his sorrows. He looks up from the deep well of his glass and laughs. “Oh, I can definitely see how that’d appeal to the ladies. ‘Bessie,’ like an old cow.”

“She couldn’t hold a candle to the TARDIS,” the Doctor agrees, patting the nearest stretch of chrome. “But she did her fair share. Mostly, though, I pulled in monsters and hostile alien lifeforms.” He pauses. “...And a few ‘ladies,’ too, actually come to think of it. Not entirely intentionally. I just seem to collect them.”

Hawkeye decides, somewhere a quarter of the way through this monologue, that he’s in for a penny and in for a pound. “‘Hostile alien lifeforms,’” he rejoins, gamely, “I’ve never tried that particular tactic, before. Usually I just offer a nice, cozy corner of the Supply Tent and a bottle of vinegar from the bottom of my storage locker.”

“And how does that work out for you?”

Hawkeye’s grin is very full of teeth. 

“I see,” the Doctor says, rolling his eyes. “Humans. It’s an obsession with you lot.”

“Birds, bees, and the human race,” Hawkeye agrees. He swirls the brandy in his glass, just to give himself something tangible and less confusing to focus on. “So, all right. I’ll bite. You’re not a human being yourself. So, what are you? Fish, fowl? Sentient plant?”

“I’m an alien. From outer space,” the Doctor says, far too cheerfully to be anything but sincere.

“...A ‘hostile’ one?”

“Only when people salute at me. I _hate_ it when they do that.”

Hawkeye nods. “I’m not a big fan of saluting, either. From me to them, especially. It’s difficult, you see, to do it without...poking my eye out with the scalpel.” He’d nearly said ‘to do it without getting blood in my eye,’ but changed course mid-sentence. That’s _too_ maudlin, even for him.

“Why are you here, Doctor? I don’t think _we_ requisitioned any more doctors, especially not ones from Mars.”

“Why does everyone always think I’m from Mars?” the Doctor demands, frowning more furiously than Hawkeye suspects he intends to. Truly, those eyebrows have a power. “Why not Saturn? Or Neptune?”

Hawkeye’s grin is impish in the extreme. “Or Uranus.”

“Yes, why not--,” the Doctor cuts himself off, and the frowny face goes even more tempestuous. “ _Banter._ ” He practically spits.

“I warned you.”

The Doctor sighs, deeply. He goes quiet a moment, considering Hawkeye’s question, most likely. “I got a bit tangled up in a time eddy. But, in truth, I wasn’t headed anywhere in particular in the first place.”

“That’s what I think about doing, sometimes, after the war. I don’t think I’ll be ready, right off, to go back to Crabapple Cove.” Hawkeye has not admitted this to anyone, especially not BJ--Beej, who will make such an intense beeline to California, once he’s able, that he’ll likely leave a trench in the earth and sea in his wake. BJ wouldn’t understand being afraid to go home again.

“‘Crabapple Cove,’” the Doctor muses. “Quaint.”

“Mm, quite ‘twee,’” Hawkeye agrees in a terrible accent, smirking a bit at the glare the Doctor sends him in response. He looks down at his glass, making out the reflection of his own dour face in the wavering, dark surface. 

The Doctor breaks the silence. “There’s no need to wait until the war is over to get away from this place, you know.”

“Yeah. You said. A space-and-time machine, huh?” Hawkeye doesn’t interact with a lot of science fiction, these days, but he listened to _Buck Rogers_ and read _Amazing Stories_ as a kid. The concept is not entirely foreign to him.

Hawkeye swirls the alcohol in his glass and thinks about time and distance and the power, utterly enticing, to change the past to suit the whims of the present. “Nah, Doc,” he says, after a long while, though it pains him to do so. “I don’t think that’s the kind of road a man like me should travel.”

The Doctor hums in soft response, far too knowing. “Yes. I understand.”

Hawkeye looks at him, gaze awfully piercing for a man in his deeply inebriated state. “You shouldn’t be alone. That’s one good thing to come out of this experience, for me. I truly believe, now, that no man should ever be an island. Being alone is never our best state, Doctor. It’s the human condition.”

The Doctor smiles wryly. “I’m not Human.”

Hawkeye purses his lips. “Doesn’t matter. You picked up a sad drunk, let him talk, and offered him a way out of the mess he’s in. Far as I’m concerned, that’s Human enough to count.”

The Doctor’s fierce brows rise in surprise and then lower, drawing in into obvious contemplation. “I don’t suppose such behavior would occur naturally to many of my species, it’s true. Your sort have rubbed off on me, I suspect.”

Hawkeye leers. The Doctor rolls his eyes.

“I’ve a man I’d like you to meet, someday, if possible. His name is Jack Harkness, and I do believe between the two of you, various universes might catch fire.”

Hawkeye grins. “I have been known to cause a few heatwaves, in my time,” he agrees. Slowly, the grin fades. His eyes dart over to the doors of the spaceship, staring as if he might see through the wooden facade to the campgrounds beyond.

“I should get back.”

“Time is an illusion. You don’t have to hurry anywhere, with me.”

Hawkeye’s thinking of Beej, sprawled out on his cot, unknowing that his best friend isn’t there beside him where he should be. He thinks of wounded in post-op, of the fact that come dawn he’s supposed to take Charles’s place there at the many bedsides. Time may be an illusion, but it can’t be stopped, not really.

Hawkeye stands and sways for a second before reaching out, offering the Doctor a hand. “Thanks for the nightcap.”

“Not that you needed one,” the Doctor replies, rising, too. His handshake is bordering on uncomfortably tight. A beat of silence passes and then he says, lowly, “I was in a war, once. It was different than this, but in the end, they’re all the same.”

Hawkeye gives the alien man’s fingers a soft squeeze and then lets go, stepping back a stride. “It’s a time machine, right?” he asks, looking around, away from the Doctor’s suspiciously damp eyes.

“Yes. Have you changed your mind about coming with me?”

Hawkeye shakes his head, sticking his hands in his pockets. “No. I just...if it’s a time machine, if you’re an alien from another world and everything...you know when this ends, don’t you?”

The Doctor opens his mouth but Hawkeye forestalls him with a raised hand. “No. Don’t tell me. Just, when it’s done, maybe you can stop by and say hello, huh? Come see _my_ home.”

The Doctor makes no promises, but he claps Hawkeye on the shoulder in a comradely manner on his way out of the Box and back into the world.

Hawkeye goes back to the Swamp. He goes to bed. In the morning, he pretends to himself it really was all just a strange, drunken dream. It’s better for his sanity, that way. Hawkeye’s learned a lot about protecting what remains of that, as of late.

\--

It’s a hot summer day in 1957 when a small blue box appears in the Hunnicutts’ backyard. It’s Erin who sees it land, and she wastes no time in calling for her mother, abandoning her mud pies and running full bore back into the house yelling “Momma, momma, there’s a strange man!” at the top of her lungs. 

Hawkeye has only a moment of confusion before understanding hits like a hammer. He buzzes past Erin and Peg both and makes his own intense beeline out into the overgrown yard.

It’s not a gray-headed old man who steps out of the box, but recognition washes over Hawkeye like a wave all the same. The woman is petite and blonde and has a broad, open smile on her face. There is nothing whatsoever about her bearing that says ‘General,’ now, but there is still an undefinable _something_ that makes Hawkeye’s back go straight and his fingers twitch. 

“It’s you,” he greets. “...It is, isn’t?”

Peggy follows him out into the yard, Erin in her arms. “Hawkeye?” she asks, carefully, clearly confused, and rightfully so. Hawkeye never told a soul about his strange evening encounter that one unhappy night.

“Hello!” the Doctor says waving at her and then Erin in turn. “I’m the Doctor. How are you, Hawkeye?”

Hawkeye grins. “Confused. But good. Better.”

“This isn’t Crabapple Cove,” she says, pointing out the obvious, throwing her arms wide to encompass all of their backyard. Nearby, the ocean can be heard lapping against the shore. 

“No. But I didn’t tell you to come see me in Maine, did I? I told you to come visit me at home. And this is it, as it turns out.”

“Hey? Where is everyb--what is that? Did we get a shed?” BJ wanders out into the yard, a damp dish towel in hand, a look of pure confusion on his face. 

“Hello!” the Doctor repeats, just as boisterously as she’d declared it the first few times. Hawkeye can’t help but marvel at the difference between this woman and the rather dour, prickly man he’d met in Korea. It’s not just the change in appearance. She has...a light. Still, he, more than anyone, understands how time can change a person. And how the right people can change a person, too.

Peg steps forward and wraps her free arm around BJ’s waist. They look perfect, in the summer sun, man, wife, and child--an American Family, to boot. Hawkeye scoots closer and loops an arm around BJ’s empty side. Still an American Family, despite what others might say or think.

The Doctor, for her part, is unphased. “Peggy, Erin, and BJ Hunnicutt, I presume,” she greets them. “You’re all about what it said on the tin, I suspect. Good, that’s lovely.”

“You really came to visit,” Hawkeye marvels. He had half-dismissed the encounter as a dream, sure, but even the part of him that had recognized it for reality hadn’t expected the old man to pop by. He was barely more than a stranger, afterall.

Or maybe not. Maybe war makes friends of its victims, even if the wars are worlds and eons apart.

“It’s...always so nice to meet a friend of Hawkeye’s,” Peggy ventures, her eyes trailing constantly back to the small box. She hadn’t seen it land, as Erin had, but she’d heard the noise. She has Ideas about it. Peggy Hunnicutt always has Ideas--it’s just a small part of why her family loves her.

BJ, for his part, ignores the box he’s decided is a shed and is, instead, rather fixated on the Doctor herself. To his credit, she does make quite a picture. Hawkeye’s never seen a woman with so many earrings, before. He has to say, he likes the look. Briefly, his eyes dart to Peg’s ears. Peggy, always on to him, catches his eye and smirks knowingly. It’s not a ‘no,’ so Hawkeye holds out some hope. If he can’t convince Peg to try it, maybe BJ would.

Hawkeye smiles at the thought. 

“We were about to sit down to dinner,” Hawkeye says. BJ holds up the dish towel in his hand as if for proof. “You want to join us? There’s always plenty to share.”

“We’re very into sharing, in this house,” Peg agrees, airily. BJ bumps her hip with his own in censure. Peg ignores him.

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t wanna--,” the Doctor beings.

“--Do you not like hamburgers? Daddy used the grill!” Erin pipes up, earnestly. “If you don’t like hamburgers, you can have chicken salad. That’s what we had for lunch, and there’s leftover! Isn’t there leftover, Momma?”

“Almost never, but this time, yes,” Peg agrees. “Honestly, please stay. We’d love to get to know you. You can tell us about yourself. And your charming...box.”

Hawkeye snorts. Pegs Ideas have come to fruition, and he has no doubt she’s absolutely on the mark.

The Doctor, for her part, laughs, realizing she’s been caught out by at least one of the Hunnicutt clan. “All right. I’m honored. And, for the record, I’d love a hamburger.”

“With pickles?” Erin presses.

“It’s a trick question,” Hawkeye warns the Doctor. “Erin doesn’t trust anyone who likes pickles.”

“I don’t know if I like pickles, actually. I suppose we’ll have to find out.”

“If you don’t care for pickles, we have tomatoes, too,” Peg says as they make their way back into the house. 

“Yuck!” Erin shouts, dramatically swooning in her mother’s arms. Peg, sensing this coming, just tightens her grip and lets Erin’s head hang toward the ground in her faux-faint. 

“Erin doesn’t care for basically anything with vitamins,” Hawkeye explains further to their guest.

The Doctor beams. “Yeah, seems about right, for her age. What about jelly babies, Miss Erin, do ya like those better?”

Erin pulls herself from her limp posture immediately, intrigued. “WHAT is a jelly baby?” she demands.

“After dinner, I’ll give you some, all right?”

Erin looks at the alien suspiciously. “Do I have to eat my vegetables to get them?”

The Doctor looks to Peg, who shakes her head. They don’t force or deny food, in this house. Peg came into her marriage with too many memories of hours spent alone at the kitchen table, staring down plates of mushy peas and over-cooked turnips. She has Ideas about that, too.

“Nah,” the Doctor says, warmly. “But you’ll have to wash your hands really well before dinner, all right? Mud pies are nice and all, but they probably don’t pair well with ‘burgers.”

Peg and BJ go to clean up their errant child while Hawkeye and the Doctor set the table. It’s strange and friendly and Hawkeye can’t help but rib the woman about it as he carefully sets down five plates.

“I’m still surprised you’re here. Especially...here.” He indicates the house at large with a fork.

She smiles and hands him another fork because he’s one short. “I am, too. I wouldn’t have come back, my former me--in fact, I didn’t. Obviously. Probably not even the me before then would’ve come to visit. And certainly not the me right before that. This is something I’m trying out, for myself. You know?”

“Not specifically like that. But, yeah. I think I do.”

She tucks her hair behind her ear. It’s not a self-conscious gesture, exactly, but there’s something in the motion that makes Hawkeye perk up and pay close attention. 

“I remembered. What you said, about no one being their best as an island. I’ve rarely ever been truly alone. It’s dangerous, for me and others, when I am. But even with people all around me, sometimes, I’ve not been very good at letting anybody in.”

Hawkeye nods. He is intimately familiar with the feeling. He’d grown up the class clown and the town flirt. He remembers what it was like to be persistently present and intimately involved but also always just out of reach. It’d taken a war to teach him about true family and the benefit of forging deeper commitments. Perhaps, for the Doctor, something similar had occurred. 

(Hawkeye does not know it, but he is correct. Their revelation had taken place in total isolation, trapped in a self-made hell, pounding their knuckles repeatedly against a surface of clear crystal, chipping it away with every death and new life until finally, finally finding their way back to home, to themselves, to the understanding that a happy life is found in the reflection one sees in the eyes of other people.

Their experience was not a war. And, yet, it had been the close of one, in its way.)

“I want to be different, this time around. So, I came here.”

“‘Here’s a good place to come, when you want things to be different,” Hawkeye agrees, softly. The knife in his hand clinks against the plate he places it beside. The sound resonates in his ears. 

The somber silence shatters as Erin races into the dining room, hands dripping wet. BJ chases after her with his dish towel to no avail. Peg follows behind at a leisurely pace, the very picture of a woman trying to hold back a sigh. Or a giggle. With Peg, it’s hard to know.

Hawkeye lunges forward and snatches Erin up into the air. Deftly, he flips her back against his chest and cradles her close as BJ runs forward and traps her flailing hands in the dish towel, rubbing them vigorously until dry.

Once the child is deemed presentable, Hawkeye plops her down in a chair and accepts the grateful kiss that BJ smacks against his brow.

“I’m getting too old for this,” BJ mourns. 

(The Doctor just laughs. There’s so much more to come. She remembers how it was. Chasing small children into submission is such a small part of the parenting experience. Wait until they’re grown, until they have children of their own. Children with adventuring spirits too big for their own good and far too many Ideas, besides.) 

“Don’t worry, dear,” Peg soothes, already in Erin’s zone, tucking a napkin over her child’s lap. “That’s why there’s three of us.”

“ _That’s_ why?” Hawkeye questions, loudly.

Peg shoots him A Look that is only mollified when Hawkeye comes forward and pulls out her chair for her. As an afterthought, he pulls one out for the Doctor, as well.

The Doctor sits down, apparently amused by the gesture. “Not gonna get used to that any time quick,” she mutters to herself.

From there, dinner is a relatively calm affair. The table is filled with medical talk (between the two doctors and, sometimes, the Doctor, though her topics are far more strange and wondrous than theirs) and slice-of-life conversations (between the table at large; Erin especially seems to delight in expounding, in detail, about what adventures she’d been had that day, before the Doctor arrived). They eat and talk and laugh and the atmosphere around the table is so warm that the Doctor stops in the middle, just once, and closes her eyes, apparently basking in it.

They say broad goodbyes together after a dessert of Jelly Babies, but it’s Hawkeye alone who walks the Doctor to her door, so to speak.

“Thank you for sharing your time with me,” she says.

Hawkeye, impulsively, lurches forward and pulls her into a hug. “Thank you, for that night. It wasn’t the worst night I ever had over there, but a lot of that was because of you.”

The Doctor hugs him back, the strength of her arms as fierce as her eyebrows had once been. Then she lets him abruptly go and steps back toward her box. “I’d like to come back, sometime, if that’s all right.”

Hawkeye grins at her. “We’re always happy to set another place at the table.” His genuine grin turns into a more exaggerated leer. “Or anywhere else you’d like to wiggle in.”

She looks at him, contemplative. “Peggy _is_ very pretty,” she says, playing along.

Hawkeye laughs. “What about me and Beej?”

The Doctor shrugs. “Maybe next incarnation.”

Hawkeye isn’t quite sure he knows what that means--he is absolutely sure he doesn’t understand a lick about who or what the Doctor has been or is now, actually--but he smiles willingly all the same. “Sure, maybe.”

“Take care, Benjamin Franklin Hawkeye Pierce.”

He hesitates for just a second and then, perfectly, salutes her. “Travel safe.”

The box makes an awful sound as it fades out of existence and into places and times unknown. 

Hawkeye finds himself standing there in the yard long after it has gone. BJ comes up noisily behind him, wrapping his arms around Hawkeye’s waist, digging his chin into Hawkeye’s shoulder. “What are you doing?”

Hawkeye, eyes on the sky, hums in soft response. “Counting my blessings.”

“No wonder you’ve been out here so long. You want me to get you a chair?”

Hawkeye laughs and turns in BJ’s loosening hold, butting his head lightly against the other man’s sternum. “Shut up. Where’s our wife?”

“Telling Erin her fifth bedtime story.”

“We really need to set some boundaries with that kid.”

“Yeah? Are you volunteering?”

“Not in a million years. And no more getting drafted, either, Beej. I’m done.”

BJ gives him a squeeze. “You’re going to explain all of this madness later, right?”

“What I can. Which, quite frankly, isn’t much.”

BJ considers this in silence.

“She thinks Peggy is pretty.”

BJ laughs. “Well, then, that makes your mysterious friend A-OK in my book.”

“Yeah. Me, too. C’mon. I’ll rescue Peg from our personal Napoleon and you can pour everybody a brandy. I’ll tell you the story, but only over drinks.”

“It’s a deal.”

\--

Afterward, Peg sets her mostly-full glass of alcohol down and considers Hawkeye with an intense, level gaze. 

He suspect that she’s going to call him out as a fibber or something of that sort, and he prepares to defend himself accordingly. Instead, though, she just shakes her head slightly and scolds:

“I can’t _believe_ you didn’t take him up on his offer to travel in his spaceship! You’re a Grade A dunce, Hawkeye Pierce.”

BJ snorts into his own glass and shoots a fond look at his wife. Hawkeye, offended, looks to Beej for reassurance. The man shrugs. “Sorry, Hawk. I’m with her on this one.”

“I was busy!”

Peg rolls her eyes. “It was a TIME machine. You could have gotten back right at the time you left. No one would have ever known.”

“There’s so many places you could have seen,” BJ adds, gaze thoughtful. “Ancient Rome. Mars. Australia.”

Hawkeye makes a face. “Who wants to go to Australia?”

“I do,” Peg protests. At his skeptical look, she shrugs. “I like kangaroos.”

“Fine, then” Hawkeye says, unwilling to accept this abuse any longer. “The next time the Doctor comes by, the two of you can just hop right in her little love machine and go to the outback. See if I care.”

\--

The Doctor, to Hawkeye’s continuing surprise, really does visit again. And again. And again. She never offers any of them the chance to step into her time machine, let alone travel in it. Hawkeye has a sneaking suspicion that she understands him too well to give him that chance. He’s glad that someone can see what his spouses do not; there are certain people in the world to whom accessibility to a time machine should not be given. (Sometimes Hawkeye wonders if the Doctor herself is one of those people, but he tries not to think about it overly much).

Instead, the family treats the Doctor to a sporadic tour of Mill Valley and a good chunk of California, besides. They feed her breakfasts, lunches, and dinners--all eaten around a communal table filled with chatter and love. They take her to the zoo and the local museum and any notable location they can think of, sometimes twice. They pull her bodily into their family, always picking up right from where they left off.

Sometimes she arrives smiling and full of new jokes with which to make Erin laugh. Sometimes she arrives quiet and dour, thoughts clearly trillions of miles and who knows how many years away. Sometimes she’s so prickly that only Peggy has the sheer nerve to approach her, and even then she sits within the other woman’s orbit, unobtrusive and silent as a the grave until the brittle atmosphere breaks of its own accord and the Doctor emerges, peaceable again. (Hawkeye knows that patented Peg Hunnicutt Special all too well. Afterwards, he pulls his wife into a quiet room and hugs her tight, aware that she does not take on such emotional baggage easily, aware that the promise of conflict leaves her shaken with teeth on edge. He suspects the Doctor knows the price Peg pays for such silent intervention, especially as she appears in such a state of grumpiness less and less with the passing years).

Erin refers to the alien woman as “my Auntie Doctor,” and unsuspecting strangers always smile and make some passing remark about how lucky she is to have so many medical professionals in her life. 

And then, abruptly, not long after Erin turns twelve, the visits cease altogether.

For months afterward, Hawkeye catches one member of his family or another standing outside in the backyard, eyes on the sky. He doesn’t question it, and he doesn’t participate in it, himself. Hawkeye knows when people aren’t coming back. “‘Maybe next incarnation,’” she’d said. Maybe the Doctor they know is gone. Maybe the new one has no use for family meals and long nights spent huddled around their brand-new television set watching _Gunsmoke_ and eating popped corn by the fist. Maybe she’s just grown tired of them. Hawkeye would understand, if she did.

“As old as you are and with all the things you’ve seen,” Peg had mused very late one evening, long after Erin had been put to bed and the fire in the hearth had died out, “We must seem very boring.”

The Doctor had just smiled and looped her fingers deftly through Erin’s waiting Cat’s Cradle as if she’d played the children’s game a thousand times before. “Yeah. You Humans always say that.”

That summer, BJ builds a new garden shed. He paints it a very particular shade of blue.

Hawkeye goes there to stand, sometimes. He closes his eyes, imagining a low and constant hum that reminds him of ventilators in the OR, and thanks whatever part of the uncaring universe may be listening for the good fortune of the consistent flow of linear time.

\--


End file.
